How Does the ANC Help?
The ANC provides exactly what is needed to not only find out what words, phrases, and constructs are used in American English these days, but also keep track of changes in the way Americans use the language. No other source of language data serves this purpose for American English. This is because: • The ANC is massive, including many millions of words of American English. To get a reliable idea of the way the language is used, it is necessary to have enough examples to know that use of a particular word or construct is not just an accidental variant, but rather is commonly enountered. The enormous size of the ANC also provides enough examples to show which words and constructs are more or less frequently used. • The ANC includes current American English, all produced in or after 1990. Therefore, everything in the corpus reflects the way Americans use the language now, not 30 or 50 or 100 years ago. • The ANC includes only language data that is guaranteed to have been produced by nativ
